How Leading Associate Degree Programs Prepare Students for Anesthesia Technology Careers - www.hospitalnews.com

Choice of general anesthetic for major surgery can continue to be based on patient and clinician preference, according to the largest-ever trial comparing the two main techniques used in the NHS. The VITAL trial, led by the University of Warwick and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, involved 2,507 patients across 49 NHS hospitals and compared total intravenous anesthesia (TIVA), delivered through a continuous infusion of the drug propofol, with the more traditional method of using volatile anesthetic gases, such as sevoflurane or isoflurane, inhaled through a mask during surgery. The findings are published in the journal JAMA.

Even when a person is fully unconscious under general anesthesia, their brain may still be doing something remarkable: processing language, recognizing patterns, and even anticipating which words will come next. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have discovered that the brain retains surprisingly sophisticated abilities during anesthesia, despite the absence of conscious awareness. The findings, published in the journal Nature, challenge traditional assumptions about the relationship between consciousness and thinking. They could also provide new insights into how the brain processes memories and language, potentially leading to advances in technologies that help people communicate after neurological injuries.

Here’s your NYT Strands hint for today, plus the spangram and all of today’s Strands answers for puzzle No. 959 on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2026. Today’s Strands theme was tricky. It helps to be a runner. Read on for all the answers.

A supply-chain attack involving ConnectWise’s cloud services has exposed Microsoft 365 customers to unauthorized application access, with researchers reporting successful sign-ins across 173 partner and customer tenants. The incident centres on credentials associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly SkyKick, and raises concerns about attackers exploiting permissions already entrusted to business software. ConnectWise has confirmed unauthorized access to application identities within its Cloud Backup environment. In an October 17 update on its service-status page, the company said it was shutting off application access, interrupting customer backups while investigation and remediation continued.

You once played Basil Fawlty in an amateur student production of Fawlty Towers at Queen’s College in Melbourne. How amateur was your Basil Fawlty moustache? It was terrible. It was real but it was definitely coloured in – I still have holes in my beard. I’d also shaved my head, so if you look at the early promo posters, you can clearly see I’m wearing a wig. Our theatre was closed so we had to perform in a circus tent in the middle of winter, on an oval in the university grounds, which was all very Fawlty Towers. I’ve always loved comedy. I didn’t really do anything serious until drama school. I always thought there might be a good spin-off with Sauron and Celebrimbor as an odd-couple situation. You play Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Tolkien wrote that Sauron “represents as near an approach to the wholly evil will as is possible”. What do you consider wholly evil? A complete disregard for the feelings and wellbeing of other people, to put it simply. It’s the intention, I think. I have horrible flashbacks to playing Aussie rules when I was about 17. I thought people were being quite evil to me at the time.